Staring at the Sun
by Black Tangled Heart
Summary: I'm not sucking my thumb I'm staring at the sun. [Reflections of Cecilia]


Staring at the Sun

© 2004 Black Tangled Heart  
  
Disclaimer: Jeffery and Sofia, I love you both. Song used is property of U2.

Dedication: A belated birthday gift for darling Lulita.  
  
_You're not the only one staring at the sun  
Afraid of what you'd find if you stepped back inside  
I'm not sucking my thumb I'm staring at the sun  
Not the only one who's happy to go blind_  
  
Long before Lux Lisbon made love on the roof of her house in warm winter rain, her sister Cecilia sat on the roof in the glow of a smoggy July sunset. She was twelve then, it wouldn't be until seventeen months later that she would lose touch with the world and stab her heart clean through with wrought iron. The roof was where she sat to watch the sun in its slow descent, to hear the sound of the world as it bled from afternoon to twilight. She wrote her dreams in her head and mundane words in her journal.  
  
Her first journal had been filled with wistfulness. Its pages had smelled of antique shop dreams, though it had been purchased brand new from a bookstore. Picking it up, she'd envisioned broken china saucers and porcelain dolls with cracked faces and gem-bright eyes. Its binding was soft, its cover burgundy and grey. She'd spelled her name within it in her dreamy cursive.  
  
And her thoughts had poured forth like all the dark tea that had collected in the broken saucers. The pages were blotched with tears, covered in sketches. Poems danced like dying stars; prose curled like blossom-drenched vines. Her dreams were pure and clear as an uncanny blue sky. She sat on the rooftop and wrote, savouring the feeling of freedom from the world inside her home, her school, her church.  
  
Ironically, it was after a church sermon that Mrs. Lisbon discovered her daughter's diary. Mary had shut herself up in the downstairs bathroom, and Mrs. Lisbon had needed soap. Stepping over clothes and pictures on Cecilia's floor on her way to the bathroom, she'd found the journal between a bra her daughter didn't yet need and a stray striped sock. Leafing through the pages, she scanned the contents.  
  
_"Cecilia!"_  
  
A lecture followed, and her pocket money was withheld. The youngest Lisbon missed three weeks of smoggy sunsets; shut up in her room with a rosary thrust in her hand. She was let out to see Father Moody, to whom she told nothing. She sat in the confessional with her hands folded tightly, swinging her feet. The rosary lay in a perfect coral coil on the floor between the bra she didn't yet need and the stray striped sock. Father Moody tried to reason with her. No one could reason with Cecilia Lisbon.  
  
"There's no need to keep secrets, Cecilia. God can see everything and He loves you."  
  
She said nothing. She knew the sun was setting, inflaming the city with its pink light. Until that light faded and offered a handful of stars. She left the confessional as silent as a cat. Her homecoming brought sickness to her stomach, anger to her eyes. When she ascended the dark stairway that lead to the roof, she felt she could breathe again. Her nausea receded; the flames in her eyes hushed to smouldering coals. She saw the last tinge of pink on the horizon; watched it melt to velvet indigo. There were no stars, only a silver-smeared moon.

--

Convinced she was cleansed of what had been idle wickedness, her mother brought her to an antique store the next afternoon. She pressed into her daughter's clammy hand the allowance she'd been denied over the past few weeks.  
  
"Buy one thing you like, sweetheart. I'll buy you something, too. Your birthday's not for another few months, but we can get you something special for being so good."  
  
Cecilia turned the dirty coins over in her small hands, ran her fingers over the bills. Her mother's gaze lingered on lanterns and silk screens. She left her daughter to her quiet self, to her own thoughts, to the first peace she'd been allowed in three weeks.  
  
Possibilities gleamed like the last rays before twilight emerged. The world was all sun and stars.  
  
Cecilia fingered tarnished silver hairbrushes and faded Oriental scarves. What caught her spiritualist gaze was a bridal gown. Its hem hacked and shorn, its lace wrinkled. It felt tired in her fingers. Tired like her heart. Who had owned this dress before her? She could feel all the tales inside of it, wound tightly. Within ever crease and stitch. They would unravel now and become her own story. She would carry the past voice of the woman whose flesh had once filled out the dress; stitch together frayed thread and missing pieces of an untold tale.  
  
Arms filled with the stories and fabric, Cecilia meandered her way through rows of candleholders and picture frames. She could hear her mother talking to one of the store's three salesladies. Beside the dusty mirrors were shelves of blank books. Their pages heavy like cream, their bindings soft as fresh bread. She held onto her dress with one hand and with the other, curled her fingers around a book that was green as a field glimmering with dew.  
  
She didn't hear the shop owner's voice until the woman spoke from directly behind her. "Would you like that book?" Cecilia whirled around, eyes burning like the sun and stars she would see on the roof later that night, pen gliding wistfully across the pages of the new diary.  
  
"Yes."  
  
She pressed the dirty coins into the woman's hand without a word and tucked the journal inside her sweater. She looked into the woman's troubled face. Her brittle chestnut hair, razor sharp cheekbones, small, grim mouth. "Thank you."  
  
As if on a cloud, Cecilia floated toward her mother, who was paying for a red Chinese lantern. Cecilia spread her dress across the counter like a beige sea. Its stories whispered and hissed. She would read them all, tell them all. "Is that all you'd like, Cecilia?"  
  
She stared at the sun and imagined her stars.  
  
"Yes."

_No one will ever know my secrets now._   
  
On the roof that night, she wrote about the remnants of creamed corn on her tongue and drew a picture of a star, her unspoken hope.


End file.
